Wall-Mounted Chess Set Lets You Stand and Play

Artwork on the wall is nice and all, but don’t you get bored with it sometimes? What if you could interact with it! That’s just what the [Artless Dodger] decided to do with this old Fidelity Chess Challenger he converted to a wall-playable chess set!

The old Fidelity Chess Challenger is a fun electronic chess set that works by operating on press input. Simply move your piece, press down on its new square and then the computer knows where the piece is. The system is just begging to be hacked into a new form factor.

He’s built the new board from scratch using MDF, and then coated it with faux leather vinyl to give it a more polished look. He’s upgraded all the switches to momentary button switches and then re-soldered all of the connections. This was a bit of a challenge seeing as the original buttons looked like this:

After that headache was done, he also added LED notification lights to help the user see the moves and whose turn it is. A cool feature lets you double-check the computer knows where all the pieces are. Simply hold down the buttons along the bottom to reveal the supposed location of the corresponding chess piece.

He’s got a great write-up on his blog if you’re interested in seeing the rest of the build — if not, at least check out his demonstration video!

I used to have that chess set… My mom found it at a garage sale for like under five bucks. It was one of many cool things in the “One box that somehow didn’t make it to the new house” when I was a kid. :(

There was something about the pieces I really liked. They looked injection-molded; they had a little spot on top, but it seemed more like resin than plastic, very dense. And it had this weird sort of swirled fibrous texture to it. (An appearance I now associate with materials like glass fiber reinforced nylon.) They were pretty nice.

That’s a neat hack, I never would’ve thought of de/re-constructing it like that… Very interesting. I’ll have to read the full write-up later. I wonder what else could benefit from such an overhaul… ;)